Eleanor Hopkins
Department: English
Discipline: English
Project Summary
My thesis uncovers bodily encounters with postal infrastructures in the nineteenth-century literary imagination. As the Post Office expanded in the nineteenth century, particularly with the advent of uniform penny postage in 1840, infrastructures, such as sorting houses, travelling post offices and steam packets, had a profound impact on British Victorians’ encounters with and imaginings of the Post Office. I place original emphasis on ‘postal bodies’, namely the ways in which postal infrastructures were embodied by those who worked on and used them. In doing so, I intervene in and complicate scholarship that has invested in the Victorian postal mythology of speed, mechanisation and ceaseless circulation, and rethink the role of one of the key institutions of Victorian Britain in the literary imagination.
Supervisory Team
Professor John Plunkett (University of Exeter)
Professor Mary Hammond (University of Southampton)
Wider Research Interests
Wider research interests include nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature, technology, infrasructures, material culture, and the body.
